Project overview
Snowdonia National Park is a breathtaking region in North Wales, known for its stunning landscapes, rugged mountains, and rich cultural heritage. As one of the most popular tourist destinations in the UK, Snowdonia offers a wide range of outdoor activities, including hiking, climbing, and wildlife watching.
My role
As lead developer on this agency project, I took ownership of the Snowdonia National Park website from design handoff through to launch, working closely with the client via weekly meetings to align on progress, iterate on ideas, and ensure the final product reflected both their vision and the needs of their visitors.
The project comprised a main Snowdonia site alongside three distinct microsites: the Park Authority, Planning & Development, and Yr Ysgwrn. Each microsite shares a unified WordPress theme built with Roots Sage and Advanced Custom Fields, while supporting individual visual and content customisation per site. This shared-but-flexible architecture kept the codebase maintainable without sacrificing each site's identity.
A standout feature was the tramper hire booking tool, complete with a real-time availability calendar. Users can check availability and submit a hire enquiry, which generates a booking record for the national park team to review and follow up on directly.
I also built a unified search tool that queries across all four sites simultaneously. Using asynchronous API calls to each microsite and aggregating the results in real time, and powered under the hood by SearchWP for deep content indexing, the tool gives users a single search entry point to find content across the entire Snowdonia digital ecosystem.
Throughout the project, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance was a core requirement, not an afterthought. This informed everything from component markup and keyboard navigation to colour contrast and screen reader support.
Learnings and conclusions
There's something quite grounding about working closely with an organisation that stewards one of the UK's most treasured landscapes. Beyond the technical work, what I'll take away most from this project is how much I learned about the benefits of keeping an open channel with the client during the lifecycle of a project. Translating their needs into practical solutions and keeping things moving without losing sight of what mattered to them. The weekly rhythm of those meetings shaped how I think about client relationships to this day.